Procedural Memory

Procedural Memory
Procedural memory, also known as implicit memory refers to the memory of skills and routines.

You draw on procedural memories automatically to perform actions like getting dressed or driving your car.

How to ride a bicycle, write in cursive, operate a video recorder – each of these skills required effort and practice at one time but once you mastered it, you were able to perform it without remembering how you learned it or the separate steps involved.

The very fact that you are able to perform the skill demonstrates that learning and memory have taken place. When you take out your bike for a ride, you don’t say to yourself, “Okay first I straddle the seat, then I put my left foot on the left pedal and then I push off the ground with my right foot...” You just get on and go. It’s as though you body does your thinking for you.

In contrast to declarative memory, procedural memory is more resistant to aging and illness.

Individuals with Alzheimer’s can perform many routine tasks until well into the disease process.

Scientists aren’t sure why this happens, but it may be because this type of memory is more widely distributed throughout the brain.

Doctors learned how resilient procedural memory is in 1953, after operating on a young man in Connecticut (now famous in the medical literature as patient “H.M”) who sought relief from epileptic seizure.

Taking desperate measures to stop the seizure doctors removed his hippocampus, a structure deep within the brain that is often the focus of epilepsy and is a vital component of the brain’s memory system.

Although the surgery controlled H.M’s epilepsy, it left him with amnesia, a devastating impairment of memory.

Although H.M was utterly unable to learn new factual information and create new episodic memories, his procedural memory was largely unaffected.

Similarly, studies in which patients with amnesia depend time each day practicing new activities, such as playing computing games, suggest that they can learn new skills.

Although the amnesic patients often can’t recall ever having played or even seen the computer games, their performance improves over time and with practice indicating that they are capable of acquiring new procedural memories.
Procedural Memory